Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
There is now a 4 our wait in our urgent care center, and an 11 hour wait in the ED, all because of this.
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One take on this will be "wow, looks like covid is really hurting healthcare.. we should double down on our measures to bring this under control".
I agree about testing. Aside from the excessive isolation that makes people miserable and causes problems with staffing it is causing problems with travel because some governments require tests for entry and they never set up dedicated testing capacity. I knew a few Americans planning to come to BC during the holidays and they just gave up (one paid for a test but getting the result took so long it expired; I'm not sure what the point of these 3 day old PCR results for asymptomatic vaccinated people is).
I'd guess that a lot of people around here believe we are in a permanent emergency and the economy doesn't really matter anymore because it is trumped by health concerns. Perhaps that can be true sometimes in the short term but economic productivity is what gives us the capacity to provide healthcare to people in the first place. We keep trashing our economy and quality of life over and over for smaller and smaller gains (our covid deaths are currently around 0.4 per million per day and 87% of eligible are vaccinated). It's unclear what the health gain for omicron is supposed to be or what we are waiting for to go back to normal. Are we trying to flatten the curve? Just do what we can, because any action is good? Maybe booster 4 will make everybody immune?